Abstract

The approaches in question here are exhibited in examinations of specific problems, rather than surveyed or generally summarized. Most of the volume should interest philosophers. Recent linguistic theory has been torn between the generative semanticists, who fuse syntax and semantics in maintaining that "the rules of grammar are identical to the rules relating surface forms to their corresponding logical forms", and the interpretive semanticists, who find syntactic deep structure a well-defined notion and who believe that the semantic interpretation of sentences derives from inputs from several levels of linguistic structure. J. Bresnan, in "Sentence Stress and Syntactic Transformations," gives a clear and elegant version of her defense of one aspect of the interpretivist position. She argues that aspects of the stress pattern of sentences can be easily and compactly explained only if lexical items are inserted at the level of syntactic deep structure before the application of syntactical transformations. W. C. Watt’s "Late Lexicalizations" argues the generativist position that the lexical peculiarities of natural languages tend to be introduced at various stages in the application of syntactical transformations. Bresnan’s paper is particularly helpful to philosophers who want to make sense of linguist’s current arguments: her evidential appeals, reasoning, and terminology can be grasped by someone with little background in technical linguistics. The volume also includes three papers, two by Hamburger and Wexler and one by Peters and Ritchie, on the abstract theory of grammar, which has come some distance since Chomsky’s contributions. These papers follow out various aspects of the realization that, when abstractly considered, transformational, and even somewhat less powerful rules, are too powerful to allow nonarbitrary solutions to the problem of identifying the grammars of particular languages.